Master the steps and you’ve mastered storytelling. Except you haven’t.

Great
storytelling, like great dancing, is an art that requires an almost
spiritual connection with your partner, the audience. You can master the
moves, but unless you can interpret and adjust to the subtle—sometimes
nearly imperceptible—reactions of your audience to your story, you’re
not a storyteller.

You’re an iPod.

Naturally empathetic people, or empaths, are particularly good at reading their audience,
as if they were born with exquisitely tuned radar. On the other end of
the spectrum are sociopaths, whose radars were never properly installed.
Most people fall somewhere in between.

If you’re not a naturally
empathetic person, there are steps to take to better read your audience.
Transformation Academy founder Rita Rocker wrote a terrific synopsis of the warning signs that you’re losing your audience.

But if you are a naturally empathetic person, or if you want to see what it feels like to be one, check out this video about new technology that lets anyone “find the visible in the invisible.”

New
software technology developed by researchers at MIT can detect the
almost imperceptible changes in the color and movement in the pixels of
videos of people, allowing us to see activity we couldn’t otherwise
see—like blood pulsating in a newborn baby’s head.

This “big world
of small motions,” as they describe it, throws off information that can
be extremely helpful to doctors, much the same way audiences throw of
information that is vital to storytellers.

It can be a bit much,
as you can imagine, picking up subtle physical cues that tell you much
more about someone's genuine state of mind than they want you to know.
It can be exhausting, really. But it is an invaluable trait that has helped--and created--brilliant storytellers for generations.